Whose University?
by From the Editor
“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Last November, as many of you will no doubt remember, students and faculty at the University of California staged a series of protests and building takeovers in response to the UC Regents’ decision on November 19 to increase undergraduate tuition by a whopping 32 percent. After the announcement that the increase had been approved, students and faculty took several actions: some refused to attend or teach classes, others took over campus buildings, while still others rallied outside administrators’ homes and on campuses across the state for several days, demanding that the hikes be repealed and state funding restored. Despite these rallies and the incredible amount of public outcry they helped generate, nothing was done to roll back or even ameliorate the situation. Instead, the administration explained away any responsibility for their actions, claiming simply that their hands were tied. Afterwards, the presidents of the several colleges, rather than rally with their students to take on Sacramento, chose instead to call in the police. In the wake of that decision several hundred students were arrested or suspended and scores more were beaten, detained, maced, or otherwise harassed by local police.
For many ordinary observers, the tuition increases at the University of California were seen as the inevitable result of state cuts to higher education, which were themselves the result of the recent economic crisis that has left both California and New York reeling from lost tax revenues. Although this is certainly part of the equation, there is another, arguably more important and certainly more insidious reason why the UC Regents found it so easy to pass such unprecedented tuition increases at a university that, like CUNY, used to be free. The answer is simple: the tuition increases will not affect them, their future, or their children’s future. The sad truth is that nearly all of the regents at the University of California, like the members of the Board of Trustees at CUNY, have no real stake in what happens to the students or faculty they supposedly represent. Instead, their loyalties are to the ideological whims of the politicians and bureaucrats who appointed or hired them, and upon whom their future employment and professional success is dependent.
Although the regents may have indeed imagined they were responding to an unavoidable crisis, the erosion of funding for state universities, from California to New York, is not merely the result of any one economic disaster, but represents instead an oligarchic, systematic, and ideologically driven attempt to privatize the nation’s several dozen state university systems by starving them of government funding and forcing them to charge more tuition while simultaneously seeking out further forms of corporate sponsorship to stay afloat. This process of corporate transformation is not merely a threat from politicians and ideologues outside the university, however, but is, more often than not, being carried out by those on the very inside, those like UC President Mark Yudof and CUNY Board of Trustees Chair Benno Schmidt who seem dedicated to the idea of drowning their respective universities in the proverbial bathtub.
This structure of de facto corporate and political governance, so indicative of the new university, is nowhere more cynically self-evident than at CUNY, where the Chancellor recently welcomed the idea of radically increasing tuition, and the Chair of the BOT is also the Vice Chairman of an organization (Edison Learning) whose sole mission is the privatization of public education. This disconnect between the needs of the students and the ideological interests of its leaders exists in part because the City University of New York is currently governed by an incredibly hierarchical and dysfunctional structure of organizations and representatives ranging from an extremely powerful Board of Trustees, a moderately influential chancellor, several university presidents who are mostly beholden to the board and the chancellor, and a very loose coalition of faculty and student senates and organizations whose decisions, concerns, and protests are frequently ignored or overlooked. While the Chancellor ostensibly has control over the future direction of the university, his appointment is always contingent upon the approval of the Board of Trustees. Likewise, all of the college presidents, including our own Bill Kelly, are appointed only on the approval of the Board of Trustees. The students and faculty, meanwhile, have practically no formal representation when it comes to the future direction of the university where they work and study.
It is time that all of the stakeholders involved, including the students, staff, and faculty of CUNY, as well as the unions and organizations that represent them, begin to agitate for democratic reforms of the University’s governance structure in an effort to shake the monkey of corporate control off their backs once and for all. It is not enough to merely have the freedom to oversee the academic aspects of our work and to pursue our research and teaching unimpeded; we must also insist that we be directly involved in the larger economic and structural aspects of the university, paying attention to and taking control over the processes and decisions that so profoundly affect our day to day experiences.
The first place to begin this effort would be with a complete restructuring of the Board of Trustees. Currently the board consists of seventeen members, ten of which are appointed by the governor and five by the mayor. The remaining two non-appointed members of the board include the head of the University Student Senate and the chair of the University Faculty Senate, the last of whom, because of supposed collective bargaining conflicts, sits without a vote. This means that of the seventeen members only two are actually stakeholders who have any real interest in the well being of the university, and of those two only one is allowed to vote. The fifteen members who make up the rest of the board, as the GC Advocate has reported several times in the past, are almost exclusively composed of persons whose primary experience and interests are in the business sector. The students and faculty of the university, meanwhile have absolutely no say in who is appointed to the board.
It should be obvious to anyone who believes in the idea of democratic self rule that the university belongs as much to the students, staff, and faculty as it does to the residents of the State of New York; and instead of allowing the governor and mayor to stack the deck with friends and political appointees, many of whom are sorely unqualified, we should insist that the size of the board be dramatically increased so that there is at the very least an equal balance between the interests of the state and the several groups of stakeholders of which the university is composed. Although the specifics of such a plan would no doubt involve a significant amount of nuanced legislation, the principle of equal representation is a good place to begin.
Instead of one student and one token, largely powerless faculty member, the board should be expanded to include one elected student representative, one elected faculty member, and one elected staff member from each of the eleven senior colleges, the six community colleges, and the Graduate Center for a total of seventeen students, seventeen faculty members, and seventeen staff members. Each of these members would have a full and equal vote in all decisions made by the Board of Trustees, except for the faculty and staff members, who would be able to vote on all decisions except those directly related to contract negotiations. Add to this an additional two gubernatorial or mayoral appointments, or perhaps two City Council appointments chosen by the City Council Higher Education Committee, and the BOT would be fairly balanced between the interests of the city and state, the staff, the students, and the faculty. Under such a structure, there would no doubt be much more debate, much less rubber stamping, and much more innovation. Most importantly, though, there would be a much greater concern for the interests of those whom the university was originally meant to serve.
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